Are you still eating ‘diet foods’, ‘low fat foods’ or ‘healthy options’? If you are you are almost certainly setting yourself up for cravings, weight gain, mood swings and bad skin. So you can eat fewer calories for sure, but you’ll look and feel like crap in the process.
These low calorie and diet foods are almost always manufactured to be low calorie by removing the fat. When the fat is removed from food it tastes of nothing. It is completely tasteless. Compare for example a 0% fat yoghurt and a full fat one. No comparison. Infact when I bought some 0% yoghurt recently by mistake I was really surprised at how watery and insipid it was. Give me full fat Greek yoghurt any day!
So to keep the diet foods tasty the manufacturers need to add something back in, that will be sugar or artificial sweeteners. When you consume sugar too frequently you’ll get a taste for it, it will tamper with your blood sugar levels and deplete you of valuable nutrients. In addition to adding weight, raising cholesterol, rotting teeth, popping you out in spots and leaving you permanently hungry.
That’s OK you might think, I’ll chose the artificial sweeteners. They’re low calorie and harmless. Just wait one moment! Eating a sugar substitute will still give you a taste for sweetness leaving you wanting more, but in addition these alternatives are known excitotoxins which stimulate your brain cells to death. They have been implicated in dementia and Ahlzheimer’s disease.
These fake sugars, so prevalent in baked goods, crisps, sauces, sweets, chewing gum (have you found one it’s not in recently?) fizzy drinks, juices, sauces, squash, jellies, jams…the list goes on is also a reason why people who want to lose weight can’t or don’t when consuming them.
Firstly, adding a low calorie sugar to a product psychologically makes people think they can have more of it. We’re programmed to eat, we’re programmed to eat sweet stuff, so we eat more because it’s lower calorie, but two is probably more calories than one normal one… I know one lady who will eat a complete box of six ‘diet’ cereal bars because they are low calorie.
Secondly, the artificial sweeteners will stimulate the appetite but unlike real sugar where the associated calories help you to stop eating (even if it is after a few too many chocolates) the lack of calories with artificial sweeteners means that people keep on eating, unsatisfied and feeling that you are hungry and still have an appetite.
Consider this next time you reach for a Diet Coke mid afternoon and feel the need for something to eat shortly afterwards.
Thirdly, these foods encourage carbohydrate cravings and stimulate fat storage and ultimately weight gain, so what you were hoping would help you to lose weight is in fact making you gain it.
I saw this happen with client of mine in her 60s who was eating really rather well apart from her use of artificial sugars on her porridge, in cakes and her hot drinks. She refused to stop taking it but wasn’t losing weight when she should have been. She eventually stopped adding it to her foods, changed nothing else and started to consistently lose 2lbs per week. Something she’d been trying to achieve for years.
Pretty good eh?!
So to keep yourself healthy, with a complete set of brain cells, in shape and cravings free follow these simple tips.
- Avoid all foods with aspartame (AminoSweet), or any other artificial sweetener in it.
- Cut all diet drinks from your life and those of your children. It’s nasty stuff and causes all manner of hormonal imbalances, infertility and mood problems in growing children.
- Cut your sugar intake by cutting back on processed foods, chocolates and sweets.
- Add in fruits like apples, pears and berries.
- If baking, reduce the sugar by 1/3. You won’t notice the difference.
- If you crave chocolate you may well be short of magnesium, so boost with nuts, seeds and green vegetables or a supplement from a good health food shop. Or I prefer to use Phil Richards Magnesium Relax. It’s super.
- If you have blood sugar drops during the day try taking a teaspoon of coconut oil each day. If the taste doesn’t suit you sprinkle it with ground cinnamon. This will help to regulate your blood sugar levels and stop your cravings.
- Eat plates of salad and vegetables, good quality protein and fats or oils. You’ll feel better on that for sure!
For more information on how artificial sweeteners can harm you I recommend
Dr Blaylock’s book ‘Excitotoxins – The taste that kills’.
To get in shape, feel fantastic and get all the health and nutrition information you need go to FastTrack Fit Camp where we offer it in one tidy, friendly package!